ingeniare t1_j8b8y1b wrote on February 13, 2023 at 1:03 AM

Reply to comment by yickth in Scientists Made a Mind-Bending Discovery About How AI Actually Works | "The concept is easier to understand if you imagine it as a Matryoshka-esque computer-inside-a-computer scenario." by Tao_Dragon

I said that you can't have theory of mind appear from scaling just any compute system, not that you can't scale it.

yickth t1_j8bx0py wrote on February 13, 2023 at 3:56 AM

Why not? I’m not trying to be argumentative, rather I’m genuinely curious why this is impossible

ingeniare t1_j8c0bbz wrote on February 13, 2023 at 4:23 AM

Let's say you have a computer that simply adds two large numbers. You can scale it indefinitely to add even larger numbers, but it will never do anything interesting beyond that because it's not a complex system. Computation in itself does not necessarily lead to emergent properties, it is the structure of the information processing that dictates this.

yickth t1_j8c2aba wrote on February 13, 2023 at 4:41 AM

Ah, but computation is scaleable, universally. No other system is. Our minds emerged from computation. And thank you for your thoughtful response

ingeniare t1_j8c4z0x wrote on February 13, 2023 at 5:06 AM

I think we have different definitions of scalable then. Our minds emerged from computation under the evolutionary pressure to form certain information processing patterns, so it isn't just any computation. Just so I understand you correctly, are you claiming an arbitrary computational system would inevitably lead to theory of mind and other emergent properties by simply scaling it (in other words, adding more compute units like neurons or transistors)?

yickth t1_j8hexi1 wrote on February 14, 2023 at 9:22 AM

No, I’m not claiming X will lead to Y; I’m claiming it isn’t impossible. Also, we aren’t sure what consciousness is or where it’s located outside our own understanding, so how and if it arose is a mystery